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Friday, May 8, 2015

He was one of my students at Walmart, and I liked him a lot:
He had worked his way up from being a stocker to being a buyer, and that—if you
can handle the pressure of having to sell twenty million dollars of merchandise
in a year—is a great job. So he had done well, and the class that he was in was
one of my favorites.

In that class was another student, who at one time gave a
presentation on Facebook, which in those days I didn’t use. OK—I did, but I didn’t
accept friend requests from my co-workers. Why would anyone? I spent ten hours
or so every workday with these people—was I now to go home and spend more
time—electronically—with them?

All that changed when Walmart and I parted ways; then,
Facebook became my connection to the four hundred students / friends I had
lost. And I quickly learned: My Facebook friends were a lot more diverse than
most friends are.

There was María, for example, also in the same class with
Pablo, and also a wonderful student. Her story was essentially the same as
Pablo’s, with the exception that she had been married and divorced twice, and
was trudging along the arduous road of single-motherhood.

She was helped on the way as many are: By a deep faith in
God. Nor was it as much God, perhaps, as it was Jesus, and I knew that she went
to an Evangelical church. But it was only after reading her Facebook posts that
I realized how “Evangelical” the church was, and how deeply it was affecting
her thinking. She quoted chapter and verse incessantly, and was convinced that
the Godless—should that word be capped? Interesting theological and grammatical
question—were imminently poised to snatch whatever last tatters of religious
liberty she could still cling to. How crazy was she? Well, she urged her
Facebook friends to sign a petition of support for Dolce and Gabana, since they
were being persecuted by the gay Nazis.

I learned a long time ago: Facebook can bring out the
absolute nastiest in a person, though YouTube, with its greater anonymity,
may well top it. At any rate, I didn’t sign the petition, nor did I respond to
her increasing rants that we gay people were threatening to topple marriage and
Western Civilization into the abyss of sin and moral turpitude. Reading her
posts, you could hear the fabric of our society being torn, slashed, rent,
sundered, and burned. Presumably, we gay people were dancing Satanically on the
ashes.

What made it ironic, I thought, was that Pablo, her
classmate, was…well, my gaydar can occasionally blip, but my guess was that
Pablo was either heterosexually challenged or homosexually gifted. And since I
knew that she was a good friend of Pablo’s outside of work, and they were
undoubtedly Facebook friends, I wondered how he felt about all the proselytizing
and commentary.

Well, my gaydar had not blipped, but Pablo certainly had, at
least in my eyes. Because Millie had liked what Pablo had written:

(To my dear Apostle Wanda Rolón, I arrived at the Church of
the Ancient Path with a life in tatters, without work, in depression, seeking
to fill a void in my heart, without identity, believing that by practicing
homosexuality God had erred with me.)

And who is the dear Apostle Wanda Rolón? Well, everybody in
Puerto Rico knows her, since she has the gumption—or perhaps the craftiness—of
standing up and telling it like it is: Ricky Martin is an ambassador from Hell.
Oh, and she’s not afraid to tell homosexuals the truth, either, and that is
that…oh, do I really have to tell you?

More recently, she had been criticized for having received a
prophecy—stuff like this happens to Evangelicals—that a group of businessmen
would buy her a private jet, since her “theology” is that old, well, actually
Ancient Path: “health and wealth theology.” OK—I would call it swindling or,
perhaps more politely, hucksterism, since she is the middle man here, between
God and man, and her take is 10%, and isn’t that fair? Besides, is she to blame
for a prophecy someone made over her? Who wouldn’t be happy, on hearing the
news that a private jet was on the way? Oh, and by the way, it never arrived,
or maybe we should be hopeful—or perhaps up the commission to 20%--and believe
that the prophecy has yet to be fulfilled. The Lord, as you know, works….

Anyway, all of the Godless, in whose camp I reluctantly
fall, were sniggering about this, and that was what inspired Pablo to write
what he did in Facebook.

Well, I read the entire post several times over, and came
upon the telling sentence:

(Today, thanks to this pastor
highly criticized by Pharisees and unknowing people I have allowed God to use
me to free people like me from the prison of living a life of evil.)

I looked, then, at his Facebook
page, and realized that sometime after I left Walmart, Pablo had married a
woman: He looks, in his pictures, to be quite happy, and he is holding a child
(presumably his / theirs) with his wife sitting next to an older child (presumably
hers / now theirs).

I pondered the whole question
yesterday, when I wasn’t teaching. Was it real, Pablo’s conversion, his
“healing” from the “sickness” of homosexuality? Was he bisexual, and thus able
to turn his homosexual side off? What had his background been, and why had he
felt that God had erred by making him gay?

More—didn’t I want him to be
happy? He stands in his photos with a wife and children, and who could not want
that for a friend? I am very clear—I don’t need everyone around me to be gay.

But I also wondered—what had
Pablo found out there, in those years when he was practicing that evil of
homosexuality? Because it’s a different world, now, for Pablo than it was for
me, at his age thirty years ago. And in some ways, I had it easier—there were
still bars, and are there any today? Because however much we tended to become
drunks, the bars were community. But isn’t everything now over the Internet? Is
there any community at all?

Well, I check it out, and yes—there are bars, and there
are churches (not, thankfully, of that ancient path) and there are social
activism groups, since we have a large gay pride march, and who organizes that?
So there were things to do, people to meet, and a life to be led, if Pablo had
wanted it.

Or could have gotten to it. Since
was it truly the apostle’s doing, this loathing of the sin of homosexuality?
Isn’t it more likely that he had felt that way all his life, had been taught
that being gay was sinful and horrible, and had been ashamed and hurting for
years before getting back on the ancient path? And now that he’s back,
well…will he stay back? Anyone’s marriage is a mystery, but how will his fare?
His wife clearly knows that he has homosexuality in his past: Will she worry
that he’ll go back to being gay? Will she watch him, to see if he watches men?
What will all that do to his marriage?

What will he feel, as he grows
older? And isn’t it odd that I ask that, since that t was supposed to be the worst
fate of gay men: We would grow old, our beauty gone, our money frittered away,
our friends fickle and then…bam, we would look around us, and see our
heterosexual friends and family surrounded by their children and grandchildren,
and how would we feel? Ah, then we’d regret the errors of our ways, as we sat
lonely and poor and despised while the whole world went happily on its way,
leaving us only misery and dejection! Hah! See!

Did it happen that way? Sure, for
some. But more often, I saw people who, like my uncle, had been married and had
had children and grandchildren, and yes, that was a blessing. But there was a
lingering sense that something had been deprived of him, and of all the other
gay men who had played straight all those years.

Two things have happened as I
write this: A heart-stoppingly beautiful man has walked into the café, and a
sister-in-law has called, since there will be a family gathering tomorrow which
of course I don’t want to attend but have to because otherwise there will be
hell to pay, since don’t forget, this is Mother’s Day weekend, and for me not
to go? Hah, better it would be to spit in her dear face!

I tell you this, since the
beautiful man has left the coffee shop untouched by anything but some lecherous
looks and memories from me. And it made me remember days long gone with Mr.
Fernández, when the love and the sex was newly minted, and had the shine and
the value of an ingot of gold. It’s just as good, and even more valuable, but
it’s different. And how often have we borrowed against that capital? Because am
I spilling any secrets when I tell that every marriage well, tinkers on the
brink of insolvency at times? We, like everyone else, have held on when there
wasn’t much there to hold onto. And will Pablo have that? Was there ever enough
fire raging to produce embers to warm them in later years?

And my sister-in-law? Well, she
is one more reminder of how deeply embedded I am in Mr. Fernández’s family,
since it is absolutely natural that at any moment Marc can and must be called,
for an affair as important as a funeral or as trivial as a search for the right
music to play for the event I don’t want to go to. So rather than facing a
lonely old age, I’ll have to have well-whetted machetes to break through the
family ties that bind.

So I tell myself, I should be
happy for him. But the question that nags, really, is this: Is Pablo really
happy? Assuming that he is suppressing his homosexuality and feigning someone
else’s heterosexuality, well…how could he be? For that matter, when I was
trading my soul for the spoils of the corporate world, was I happy?

I ended up happy to have done it,
and happier still to have done with it. But there’s a reason, I think, why the
whole issue of marriage equality resonates so strongly. Every one of us at
Walmart felt the same way, and many of us said it openly: When I walk out that
door, I leave it behind me. Put it this way—everybody had a picture of the wife
and kids on their desk at work. But how many had a picture of the Home Office
next to their bed?

And so Pablo has been saved, and
is now married and with children. No, I don’t know if he’s happy, or if I
should be happy if he is, or even if he thinks he is. What do I know?

Well, I hope he really has been
saved, and that God came in and did a good scrubbing, and tossed that old devil
homosexuality out of Pablo’s life, and left the temple orderly and immaculate
and straight, God dammit! Because otherwise?

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!